The real Halloween scaries of 2014

If you want a real Halloween fright, don’t look for it among the trick-ortreaters coming to your door— just check out the Republican spooks tying to peddle panic in this political year.

Early in the summer, their big scary was a few thousand Central American children crossing into the U.S. This sent such excitables as Gov. Rick “Oops” Perry skittering from one Fox News show to another, warning darkly that the children were agents of death who should be packed on buses pronto and shipped back to the rapes, gang warfare, and intractable poverty they were fleeing.

But—oops — the kids turned out to be… well, kids. No threat at all. So the fraidy cats found a new fear to stoke: Terrorists! Yes, squealed panicky GOP congress critter Duncan Hunter in early October, no less than 10 of the murderous Islamic terrorists from Syria and Iraq have been caught sneaking into the U.S. across our Mexican border. Duncan was implying that Islamic devils were coming to behead your entire family. Wow, that’s scary— only it wasn’t true, no terrorists were crossing.

But truth is no deterrent to determined fearmongers. So next came tea party frightmaster, Rep. Joe Wilson, trying to score a trifecta of fear by warning that (1) foreign terrorists who’re (2) infected with Ebola are (3) likely to sneak across the Mexican border to spread Ebola across America. “I’m very concerned,” Fraidy Cat Joe recently said about “the creed of Hamas.” The wide-eyed tea partier told his audience that Hamas terrorists “value death more than you value your life.” Then he hit the Code Red Panic Button, offering this conclusion from the depths of his ignorance: “Part of their creed would be to bring persons who have Ebola into our country.”

What’s truly scary is that these screwballs actually hold positions of public authority in America.

Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com

This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.